Counting on federal funding they claim not to want

Conservative governors across the country keep pounding their chests, promising not to accept the federal Medicaid expansion that is coming when the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented in 2014.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is one of them. But he is not above counting on the federal money when it is convenient. Think Progress has the details[1].

But while he was making a public show of turning down federal funds, Perry was using the additional dollars in state budget projections.

In a letter explaining how he would fill a budget gap left by Texas’ decision to defund Planned Parenthood, Perry’s office uses the money the federal government will pay states that make Medicaid available to individuals up to 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Line in its budgetary assumptions: